The Beat Goes On

It's been a busy couple of weeks -- I've been getting out less with the kids than I like, but I've been able to put in some productive time on UnschoolerDad's current programming project. Not being a software engineer myself, usually I'm confined to bookkeeping and helping to wrote ticklish emails; but this project has some stuff I can sink my teeth into. This the longer break between blog entries. Oh, and Blogger eating some of my notes didn't help. :(  Nonetheless, learning continues... as if I could stop it if I tried!

The Bob the Builder spree has died down, but one of the last episodes the kids watched was about a dinosaur dig. I took that opportunity to get out the plastic dinosaur we long ago buried in plaster and let the kids continue digging it out. We put it away, back then, because sharing tools became too contentious. This time we talked about some ways of sharing, and things went much better -- particularly after we discovered that craft sticks, of which we have plenty, made the best tools for getting the plaster off. We exposed enough to figure out we were digging out a biped (P thought she remembered it was a stegosaurus); I'm sure we'll get it the rest of the way out at some point. The kids enjoyed the feel of the plaster dust, and figuring out ways to handle it so we wouldn't inhale a bunch of it. They also explored the use of gentler tools and techniques as we began exposing the buried dinosaur.

Learning to share more peacefully has been a theme:

• There's been some lovely cooperative play with the wooden train tracks and our many trains, as various combinations of family members have built track layouts together, modified them, played with trains on them, and improvised shelters and garages for the trains and their friends, the cars and trucks. T's really getting into social pretend play with the wheeled beings, much as P did at his age. 
• The kids made and baked some things from Sculpey clay, including a bunch of play coins; it turned out this was so P would have some play money she'd be willing to share with T, as she felt her existing play money set was "too special." It's true that T mostly still loses things with many small parts, so I can understand. They had fun painting their play money with acrylic paints after it was baked.
• One morning when UnschoolerDad and I were on a phone call for the software project, the kids made a museum in their rooms, with multiple exhibits of different objects of interest from their collections. P helped T put together an exhibit of some of his favorite toys (dinosaurs, cars, trucks, transformers, and airplanes), and she made exhibits of musical instruments, sewing accoutrements, and stuffed animals, as well as a please-touch exhibit with fun tactile stuff for T to play with. T didn't get the memo; he enjoyed the sewing exhibit the most. But it was delightful to come out of our phone meeting, for which we'd equipped the kids with snacks and technological toys, and find the time had instead been spent in pure creativity and cooperation!

After the kids made their own museum, we spent an afternoon at our local museum of nature and science, which has a new exhibit of snakes and lizards, including dozens of live animals and several hands-on activities. The kids were engaged by a little stage show about snakes' sensory abilities; several times P mentioned she'd learned about various things in the show from watching Wild Kratts. Both kids loved seeing the snakes and lizards up close and making links between what we saw there, what they'd learned before, and the kinds of toy snakes they had at home. They shopped for snake and lizard toys (P did some money math to decide what she could afford), and played snakes and lizards with both toys and their bodies after we got home. P saw a picture at the museum of an Indian Cobra and recognized the markings on its back as matching one of her toy snakes, which she showed me when we got home.

There's been lots of fun with books. T has continued bringing me the anatomy book from the library for questions and general exploration, and P's been drawn in a few times. Once, T was looking through the book on his own, when he excitedly called out to me, "Mama! I found the baby page!" He'd found the sequence on fetal development. We looked through it together, talking about how the baby developed and how similar the baby in the book was to T when he was inside me. Then we looked at the pages on birth, infant development, and puberty, talking about how kids' bodies and abilities change as they grow. Both kids were rapt, though P was more interested than T in the puberty information. T correctly pointed out that the baby in all the fetal development drawings was a boy, but that some of the babies and kids shown later on were girls.

On another day, T asked lots of questions about the circulatory system pages. Arteries and veins have been catching his attention in all the diagrams, so now he learned about the chambers and valves of the heart, capillaries and how they bleed slowly when he gets scraped up, balloon angioplasty (this seemed intriguing and somewhat confusing), and more. He asked what the red blood cells were, and we talked briefly about the roles of red and white blood cells in the body. The next day, he brought me the book again, and I asked what he wanted to look at. He asked, "How do I pee?" So we found the pages on the urinary tract in boys, and I showed him the path urine takes from kidneys to bladder to penis and out. He traced over that path a few times with the superball he'd been playing with. Then he traced it backwards and asked, "What happens if the pee goes this way?" I said that if it brought any germs from the outside with it, the germs might get into the bladder and cause an infection. Without missing a beat, he said, "And then the white blood cells would fight the infection." Hooray for connections!

Another day, P pulled out the children's dictionaries we have and took a fun exploratory trip through hers, which has more interesting pictures and sidebars. For an hour or more, she excitedly pointed out her finds to me and T. She found pictures of the Earth's structure and linked this to lots of recent talk about volcanoes, including questions about calderas, volcanic chimneys, what colors lava can be, and so on. That same afternoon I found myself humming a theme from Beethoven's 6th symphony. T wanted to know what it was, and P recognized it as coming from Fantasia but misidentified it as the "forest spirit music" (Stravinsky's Firebird Suite), so I played both on YouTube so she could hear the difference. The Firebird clip I chose was the forest-spirit sequence from Fantasia, and as P watched it, she realized for the first time that part of that sequence takes place in the caldera of a volcano. We made the connections, including the super-fertile soil that comes from the breakdown of volcanic rock (the volcano in the Fantasia sequence gets covered with rich vegetation after its eruption,albeit with magical speed) and proceeded to listen to a bunch more great music as I finished making dinner.

Though P looked at pictures more than words on her dictionary expedition, she's definitely using text to make sense of her world. She frequently points things out to me or asks questions based on what she's read in her environment. And a few times recently, she's read aloud to T, which both of them enjoy immensely -- me, too! T is enjoying hearing short chapter books read aloud. Most recently I read him the Magic Tree House book Buffalo Before Breakfast, in which Jack and Annie visit a Lakota encampment before the destruction of the buffalo herds. Later, T told P, "Holding up two fingers means you're a friend."

Some other recent highlights:

• I helped P get her room really clean. She did a lot of the initial work, and I came in to help with the later, more difficult stages. I've been helping her clean a lot in the evenings, which can get frustrating for me, since it seems like we're picking up the same things day after day, and it seems no cleaning is happening during the days between activities. So I've started trying to help out during the day, when a minute or two of tidying up can save several times that effort later on. Trying to get things clean with minimal stress is still a work in progress, but P is pleased with how her room looks, and we actually had space to play in her room during T's nap today.
• During some alone time with me, T asked, "Why do babies have to stay in hospital long day?" (He meant, for a long time.) He was in the NICU for a week after he was born with several issues -- thankfully the NICU here lets moms stay with the babies 24/7, so it was a lot less scary than it could have been -- and we talked about how some babies (not all) need to stay for a while to help them get healthy so they can go home. He asked why he was sick, and I replied truthfully that we never really knew what caused his problems. He said, "I think maybe something went down the wrong way and I got sick." That's close to one of the possibilities, which is that he aspirated some meconium, leading to pneumonia. I wonder how much he remembers about any of that; I have some vague memories of very early events, and I've talked to others who have earlier and clearer memories than I do. It's good to be able to help him think through it.
• P and I, on our date night at a restaurant alone together, talked some about calories. UnschoolerDad and I have both been trying to shed a little extra weight, and P had gotten the idea that excess calories could be problematic. I kicked myself a bit for discussing it in front of her without giving her useful context, and proceeded to give it -- that calories are how we measure energy from food, that we all need them, and that gaining weight is good at her age, since she's growing quickly. She says she doesn't want to gain weight because she really likes her current car seat and knows she'll outgrow it at 65 pounds. I assured her we could find her another good one, and also assured her that growing kids who eat a good variety of healthy foods and eat only when they're hungry will stay healthy and grow as fast as they should. We also talked about how sweets give quick energy that goes away quickly, while other foods give longer-lasting energy, which is why I encourage the kids to eat something non-sweet first when they are hungry. Food and sweets lost some of their tension after that conversation.
• We watched Bambi together for a family movie night. We'd previously thought T might be too scared by it, but he requested it. He was a little sad about Bambi's mother dying, but relieved that he still had his dad. He had lots of questions afterward about fire, and why the animals would be safe on an island while the forest burned.
• There's been some good physical activity. Both kids went to gymnastics classes and to an open gym. They had fun playing in the snow one very snowy day, and taking advantage of its freshness to eat as much snow as they could hold. I also had chances to take each one swimming without the other, so they could do what they wanted. (Since neither was swimming strongly yet, they had to go where the other wanted to be a lot, so I could be with both of them.) P, who quit swimming lessons a while back, has been continuing to experiment on her own. I challenged her to swim across the deepest part (where she can still touch) without touching the bottom, and though her methods were highly unorthodox, she managed it! That was enough to let her go down the waterslide, so I offered that, but she was having fun and wanted to practice swimming more. This is a great milestone, since her being safer in the water means there will be more chances for both kids to swim. T, in his swim time with me, wore water wings and spent almost the whole time in the deep end, enjoying the sensation of floating and perfecting his kicking for propulsion. I think they'll both become swimmers yet! 

Principles, Projectors, and Pineapples

One thing many radical unschoolers recommend is living by principles rather than rules. So last week, when P left the dinner table and started a video, which attracted T away from his just-started dinner, and UnschoolerDad (UD) asked me if I thought we should make a no-videos-until-everyone's-done-eating rule, it was a good chance to think together. I asked UD if we could track that rule-making impulse to a principle that could give us more general guidance. We played with some ideas and decided a good principle to try on would be:

No one should have to choose between enough food and enough play.

There may be more elegant or accurate ways to say that -- I'm an incorrigible qualifier, so I want to add "when practicable" and other such dangly bits to this. But I think it works well as a principle as given -- it's a direction in which to steer. So on that night, I saved some of T's favorite foods from dinner for him to eat later. When UD and I were done eating, I invited P to bring the video to the table, so eating and watching could both happen. Everyone ate, and everyone played.

There has been a related trend of food and play competing for our kids' attention: it's been hard for us to get T to stop playing long enough to eat enough food in the evening so that he's comfortable going to sleep and sleeping through the night. We've tried various ways to address this, but shortly after the evening above, we hit on a solution. We do encourage T to eat dinner, but then when bedtime is coming, we make T some tasty food that will keep overnight without refrigeration -- a quesadilla or a PB&J sandwich, say -- and give it to him. He can eat some of it in the evening if he wants, and so far he's always eaten what's left for breakfast. He is happier night and morning, and we don't have to worry about whether he's getting enough food. Hooray for principles at work!

So about the projector. Once upon a time, before kids, we were frequent TV watchers. We had satellite TV, TiVo, and a room partly devoted to media, with a projector for big-screen viewing. We got rid of the satellite  feed when we realized TV was using up too much of our time on trivia that we would rather spend on other things. Then came kids and several moves. The projector has been languishing as we became increasingly anti-TV for ourselves and the kids. But since beginning to unschool, we are finding that the kids learn a lot from their time watching videos and playing video games (we still don't have cable or satellite, since the Internet provides such a wealth of content now). So UnschoolerDad finally convinced me that it was okay to put up the projector screen in our living room. He pointed out that it's easier for an adult to keep up with, comment on, or otherwise participate in the kids' viewing if it's on a screen that can be seen clearly from the kitchen; and the kids have an easier time multitasking if they want to watch and do something else (jump on the trampoline, dance, roll around, play with a toy) at the same time, so watching becomes less sedentary for them than when it happened only on iPads or my computer.

Both kids have been enjoying watching Bob the Builder on the projector. They're learning about building techniques (sometimes we stop and talk about it when the program gets it wrong) and enjoying pretend play as the BTB characters, switching roles when they want to do something that machine wouldn't be able to do. BTB models cooperation and forgiveness (moving on from a difficulty and helping people make amends when appropriate, rather than laying blame or punishing), too. Both kids love the footage of real construction projects that's included in most episodes.

We've also had some good movie nights on the projector. We watched The Wizard of Oz last night. T decided to go to another room with me during the scariest part, and later that evening he wanted to talk a lot about tornadoes. I'm glad they aren't a major hazard where we live; but the kids do know where in the house to go if there ever is a tornado in the area. It was interesting, too, looking at the special effects (such as they were) with P and think about how people showed imaginative scenes in movies before computer graphics. It always gives me a giggle when we watch an old movie and all the credits fit in the time taken by a short overture before the movie begins. Moviemaking has certainly become more complex!

One day when I accidentally fell asleep while getting T down for his nap, P spent her time learning to fold origami models from diagram instructions. I've given her a little help with this before, but this was the first time she did a lot of folding on her own. She taught me the models she'd learned (a pouch and a piano) and was very pleased with herself. She made a party blower that didn't turn out too well in that it blows out but doesn't roll back up. She told me how she should have made it by leaving it rolled for a day or more in a rubber band. Later I found the instructions that said that. They were text-heavy; she had to read a page of small print to get that information. It was good to see that she's using her reading skills in real-world ways, even though she's reading less for pleasure these days. She does still eagerly devour books from her favorite series when she finds new ones, and the reading aloud is still frequent and much enjoyed.

Some more highlights from this week:

• After her origami spree, P taped together a three-sided pyramid from cut pieces of paper and showed it to me, totally unprompted.
• I gave T and P each a kazoo. T was tickled at the sounds P made, but he didn't know how to make a sound at first, and he didn't know what "hum" meant. So I asked him to say no with his mouth closed ("Mm-mm"), and then do the same with the kazoo in his mouth. He lit up when he realized what he needed to do, and much musical play has ensued. We also tried making the kazoo sound with wax paper folded over a comb. Both kids could make it work, but T was especially good at it.
• Our sugar crystals never really crystallized more than a tiny bit, but the borax crystals came out beautifully. We ate some of the sugar syrup over banana slices, and we used some to make lemonade.

Borax crystals, lying on some recent reading material

• T learned to turn on the stereo and switch to his current favorite CD, which is Hicksville by Celtic Cross. Both kids danced to the title track on a recent evening while getting ready for bed. P said she thinks all music tells a story, and that the latter part of the song sounded like a secret agent sneaking around, looking for his/her nemesis; so she danced that story. I tried dancing in a completely different way, and she made up a story to go with my dance. 
• P decided to try making a board game. We tossed some ideas back and forth about what would make a game fun, and she drew a game board and started implementing them. We tried playing the game and found it too long, with game pieces that wouldn't stay in place, and we talked about ways to make it better.
• T wanted to use the game board for a home for his toy truck, which made it hard to play with, so I drew him a plan view of a house the right size for the truck, with rooms, furniture, etc. P made one, too, and I could see her thinking hard about it -- how to design a front hall to block high winds (we had some hurricane-force winds here one night this week), what a bathroom sink would look like from above, and more.
• We played outside, taking stock of what the 100-mph winds had blown over, digging, climbing, taking care of downed branches, and more. T asked how all the beans got outside on the ground and learned that they were actually deer droppings! We dug into our years-neglected compost pile and marveled at the transformations taking place there.
• While watching a couple of Phineas and Ferb episodes, we stopped to find the meanings of some expressions like "drop a dime on you" and "color commentator." I also checked out an encyclopedia of word and phrase etymologies this week, and while I've read it mostly to myself, it's been fun sharing some meanings with P.
• P was painting and collaging pictures of tall ships, after watching a Phineas and Ferb episode that included a pirate ship, and she wanted to do one for each ocean. So we looked at the four major oceans and how they connect up with each other, and we thought about which ones might have icebergs in them.
• We bought a pineapple at the grocery store, the first fresh one the kids could remember eating. I showed P how to cut it up and we talked about what it resembled (artichoke, pine cone). P put the leafy top on her nature table. P and T both loved eating it.
• P, annoyed by a very loose tooth, yanked it out and dealt very cheerfully with the resulting blood. She noticed the bleeding stopped quickly on its own, and we talked a bit about platelets and clotting. She observed that her older baby teeth have brown blood in their roots, while this new one was fresh and red. She connected this to the difference between raw and cooked chicken, but also noted that well-cooked chicken still has some parts inside the thigh that look red. (I found a link about why this is; our chicken is cooked more than these examples, but it's reassuring that even these awful-looking pieces of chicken are safely pasteurized.)
• We dissected owl pellets (thanks, Dad!) and sorted out the many, many tiny bones inside. P pulled out her book on the subject, Owl Puke, and we identified them as rodents, decided how many animals were represented, and figured out what most of the bones were.
• A few days later, after I brought home a picture book on anatomy from the library, T asked for lots of reading from it, especially noticing the bones, but curious about other things as well.
• We played with one of those bird whistles with water in the bottom, making a warbling sound. 
• P used a cardboard tube (narrowed) and aluminum foil to make quite a fetching model flute for pretend play.
• P and I played Mastermind some more. She played a game as the guesser and asked for some coaching on her guessing. It was wonderful to see her using the logic tools and ways of organizing the guessing effort that I was offering, along with those strategies she already understood, and making some very logical and successful guesses.
• I read the Magic School Bus chapter book Penguin Puzzle to T and P, who proceeded to do lots of penguin hatching and swimming play, with species specificity, leopard-seal predators, stages of feather growth, etc. 

Talking about penguin camouflage made me think of countershading in sharks. I tried to look it up and show P, but first I found this slide show on shark senses, which P loved. The title image was dried shark heads in a shop window, and P asked if people ate shark. I said yes, and that unfortunately sometimes sharks were killed just for their fins, for shark-fin soup. She asked why fishermen didn't just anesthetize the sharks and remove their fins, leaving the sharks alive, so we looked up what dorsal fins are for in sharks and other fish (stabilization against rolling), and P easily related this to her experiences with learning to swim.
Looking further for countershading photos, we found the Wikipedia page on camouflage and followed links from there to learn about shape, shine, shadow, and how various kinds of camouflage disguise or eliminate these visual clues. We saw photos of disruptive coloring, fringed/tapered edges to avoid shadows, mimicry of surroundings, etc. Later, P, seeing some popped popcorn kernels in the trash, remarked that they were well camouflaged among the used tissues.

As we looked at the camouflage photos, I showed P the first image on the page, of sticklike caterpillars, and asked if she could find the animals in those photos. She wanted a hint, so I said they were the young stages of an insect. She said, "Oh, so maybe a larva or a caterpillar." It's so much fun seeing evidence of retained understanding!

Chores, Choices, Chromosomes, Contact, and Crystals

I seem to have reorganized part of the inside of my head. This is hard to show pictures of, so here's a crystal tree to keep you going:

I recently finished reading Sandra Dodd's Big Book of Unschooling, which I bought from her at the Always Learning Live unschooling symposium. Lots of it was familiar from reading on her website; the book is a sort of snapshot of the web site from 2009. But there were many parts I hadn't seen before. One of them involved chores such as housecleaning. Sandra wrote that one of the principles they try to live by at her house is, "If a mess is bothering you, YOU clean it up." Really? Even if someone else made the whole thing? Even if I know who it was? This was in deep conflict with my existing ways of thinking about parenting. But it also resonated with some of what I'd heard at the symposium from other parents, and it sounded good, especially to my inner kid. I decided, provisionally, inside my own head, to try it out for a while. If P's room was really messy and bugging me and she didn't want to clean it, I'd spend some time on it myself. (This took some convincing of P the first time; she thought I meant to go in and get rid of things because she wouldn't clean them up, a sad memory from our older ways of doing things. We're still working on rebuilding trust from that sort of thing.) If the living room was too messy, I'd spend some time on it. (The living room is often a hard one to assign responsibility for anyway, since many people's messes intermingle there.)

I found that cleaning P's room by myself felt entirely different from cleaning it with her, in a good way. I didn't feel I had to teach her or somehow entrain her into doing it correctly on her own. I was just doing it, seeing it as my own project. I put things where I knew they went, or if I wasn't sure, I left them in a little pile in the middle of the room, so P wouldn't have a hard time finding them later. I enjoyed seeing what P was playing with and what kinds of juxtapositions she had made. I made some judgment calls I felt comfortable with as far as what bits and pieces to keep and what to recycle or throw away; and with some effort, I avoided the passive-aggressive urge to throw away more than P would, since I (!) was the one doing the cleaning. I felt at peace in that I was simply doing the task that I felt needed doing, not trying to get an unwilling other person to do it. I did feel a little irritated the next day, when most of what I'd cleaned had been messed up again. But I continued trying to be honest with myself, internally, about whether it was bugging me and why, and cleaning up when it felt like that would make my world better; and the irritation has passed for now.

In the rest of the house, focusing on tidying up and cleaning because I, personally (not some external arbiter or internalized voice in my head), would like things to be neater or cleaner, has had interesting effects. Parts of the house get a little messier than they used to, at least for a while. Other parts are cleaner. The kitchen looks great; I use it every day, and it really makes a difference to me when it's clean and ready to use. The bathroom is clean; I like using a clean sink and toilet and looking in an unbespattered mirror. I either put others' laundry away, feeling I'm giving them a gift and/or making my world better; or I wait until I can feel that way about it, or until they put it away themselves, whichever comes first. The living room only bothers me sometimes, so it gets picked up less frequently. Yesterday I saw UnschoolerDad walking across pieces of trash on the floor (there had been a pretend game involving lots of paper tickets or something) and asked him if it bothered him to be doing that. He said yes, and I said it was bothering me, too, so how about if we cleaned up? In about 10 minutes, the living room was looking great, and we were both feeling better about it. There was no browbeating the kids. Okay, we did tell them there were a few paper playthings we'd have a hard time telling apart from trash, so if they wanted to keep them, they should pick them up. Mostly they didn't care; the fun had been in making the things, more than in using them past the first couple of days.

Would I want my kids to sit, unheeding, while I clean up their messes, forever? Nope. I'm not there yet, if indeed I ever will be. And I still do ask them to clean up some of their own messes (used tissues, and sometimes things I let them get out on the condition they would clean them up), though I try to let them have some say in the timing. I reserve the right to change where I draw the lines. But for now, I find cleaning up by myself much faster and less stressful than making the kids do it with me. And I don't think the kids are benefiting from my making them clean up. I think they're learning to resent it, and that their resistance to helping is likely to get worse, not better, unless and until they have their own reasons for wanting things cleaner or for helping me. (Empathy is not a strong point of their current developmental stages, but that won't be true forever.) Sure, by being made to pick up trash and put toys away, they learn how to do those tasks, but they aren't rocket science. It's easy stuff to figure out, and T (who has had far less required of him at age 3 than P has at ages 5-7) does tidy up spontaneously now and then. They do enjoy certain kinds of cleaning, like scrubbing the floors, if I let them choose when to do them. One unschooling writer, Joyce Fetteroll, often has unschooling moms consider whether what they're telling their kids is okay, by imagining their husbands saying the same things to the moms. I would be pissed if UnschoolerDad tried to tell me when to scrub the floor, or that it was time for me to pick things up off the floor right now, while I'm in the middle of writing a blog entry. If there were a good reason I could understand (if someone on whom we wanted to make a good impression were on their way over, say, or if he would be willing to vacuum if the floor were tidied up before he had to go do something else), I'd be on board. But I'd have to understand it, or at least trust his reasoning. When the chores required and the times for doing them are arbitrary as far as they're concerned, it's hard for the kids to get on board.

What many parents of older unschooled kids say is that, once the parents switched from requiring kids to do chores to doing them cheerfully themselves, the kids first kicked back for a while as they came to trust they wouldn't be forced to work, and then started pitching in fairly frequently without being asked, or even going beyond the original scope of work to do other chores they noticed needed to be done. I can hope for that. But I think that if I fix that in mind as my goal, it will lead to more of the same old resentment if it doesn't pan out on whatever schedule I have in mind, or for a particular task. So for now, I'll keep trying out the theory that chores won't be hard to learn when the kids are ready, and that doing them myself preserves more peace for me and everyone else than trying to conscript the kids into doing them. The more I can let go of my angst and resentment around chores (and I have had plenty), the more attractive helping me will look. We'll see how it goes.

I've continued trying to think in terms of two choices -- think of at least two ways to handle a given situation, and choose the one that matches my goals better. I've talked with P a little about this, too, to help her handle times when she's exasperated with T. It's sinking in a little. "Did you make a choice?" is becoming a useful question between us.

I saw a great TED talk this week and shared it with P and T. It's about scientific visualization of molecular processes within the human body. It had amazing visuals of DNA folding into chromosomes, and of mitosis, especially the part where microtubules pull one duplicate set of chromosomes to each end of the cell, forming two new nuclei. P enjoyed it, too. We paused a lot to talk about the basics (DNA replication, chromosomes, cell division, etc.). T, who watched most of it with us, asked at one point, "Is that going on in my body right now?" Yes, everywhere, my dear! I love it!

P watched large portions of the movie Contact with me this week. She wasn't much interested in all the talk and arguing about scientific funding policy in the beginning (no surprise), but once the prime numbers started coming in over the Very Large Array in New Mexico, she was pretty well hooked. We paused to talk about ham radio and some of its conventions, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI), what prime numbers are, and why hearing them on a radio telescope would indicate a transmitting intelligence.

Before I get to crystals and everywhere they took us, here's a brief roundup of other highlights. There's a notable lack of anything involving leaving the house here, since we're still convalescing from the flu.

• I made a new robe for P this week. In the process, I showed her a few things about garment construction and how to use a sewing machine. She's not super-interested in machine sewing yet, but she listened and took it in, and she hand-sewed herself a little purse that day.
• P and T were playing a pretend game based on SuperWhy at one point (the SuperWhy board game was a total bust for actual game play, but the game pieces inspired extensive pretend play!), and when P tried Princess Presto's line, "Cue the sparkles! Cue the music! Princess Presto to the rescue!" only she said, "Do the sparkles! Do the music!" I realized she was missing the word cue. We talked about what cue means in stage and screen productions. With all the pretend play, this was right up P's current alley.

• P was looking with me at an online gallery of art-history references from The Simpsons (which she doesn't yet watch, but the gallery was linked on an unschooling list) when we saw a portrait in the style of Pablo Picasso, complete with too many eyes showing in a profile portrait. P remembered that Major Monogram on Phineas and Ferb is always shown the same way:
I showed everyone a video I found a while back of a vortex cannon (air cannon) being used to blow down structures made of straw, sticks, and bricks. That was fun! 
The kids and I watched Toy Story 3 together. This was mostly simple fun, but we did see a way that magnets could be used to sort ferrous metals out from trash, and the kids learned what an incinerator is. There was also some Spanish music and dance toward the end, when Buzz Lightyear got reset.
One morning, both kids were measuring everything with retractable metal tape measures. P told me a certain laundry basket was 13 inches across. I asked how many of those it would take to equal her height. (She's been telling me about some math of about that difficulty that she's doing in her head.) Rather than try the numbers, she started measuring 13-inch segments up her body, concluding that about three and a half of them fit within her height. I like her sense of what division means, there.
T has been having a lot of fun playing with my decommissioned electric toothbrush; seeing what the moving parts are and how they connect, seeing what kinds of noises it can make, changing brush heads, feeling the brush against his hand, enjoying the vibrations, and so on. 
P said something about platypuses being the only egg-laying mammals (monotremes). I thought I remembered otherwise from a museum exhibit, so we looked it up. We found out that four species of spiny anteaters (echidnas) share this distinction. And we found out the "mono" in "monotreme" comes from the fact that eggs, solid and liquid wastes all exit through the same cloacal opening. Guess it's a good thing those babies are inside protective shells, eh?

Okay, now for the crystals! This morning I got out a "Mystical Tree," which I bought recently on a toy store run with P. We set it up and got it growing. The finished product, after 6 hours, is shown at the top of this post. Here it is halfway through its growth:

I warned the kids not to touch the liquid, and then wondered whether my warnings were too strong. So I looked up the main ingredient, monopotassium phosphate. Yes, it's an eye, skin, and lung irritant -- and it's used in fertilizer and Gatorade! Okay then; I started thinking about other crystal-growing experiments the kids could be more hands-on with. I remembered making rock candy by growing sugar crystals in elementary school. So I heated up some water, dissolved a whole lot of sugar in it, and put it in two pint jars with wool yarn hanging down into them from craft sticks on top, below:

Then I got to thinking -- was that really enough sugar? I looked up a recipe for doing this and found that I'd put perhaps a third as much in as I should to saturate the solution. P watched as I boiled the solution again and put in more and more sugar, and always it dissolved out of sight. We talked about how the sugar molecules were associating with water molecules, and how we wanted to get to the point where every water molecule was doing all it could to dissolve the sugar molecules, with none left over. The dissolving got slower and weirder-looking (floating islands of granulated sugar, anyone?) until finally the solution wouldn't take any more and went all grainy. We added tiny bits of water until things dissolved again, and then re-jarred the solution to sit overnight. I gave the kids each a bit of the saturated sugar syrup in a bowl to feel and taste, and meanwhile I browsed online for other ideas. I found a page about making a Borax snowflake. P decided to try it with a spiral shape, which she made, below:

This time she did the stirring-in (only about 4.5 tablespoons of borax would dissolve in our jar of water, compared to more than 2 cups of sugar!), enjoying the swirling clouds of borax that slowly dissolved away, and the musical notes the spoon made against the jar. The jar was getting a little overfull, so I took out some water, and we found the notes got higher -- it seems the water, not so much the jar, was what determined the functional size of the resonator. After we put the jar up to cool and sit overnight next to our hopeful rock candy and (just for comparison) my weaker sugar syrup (I'll post photos of the finished crystals next time), we watched YouTube videos of glass harp music. I tried to show P how to play by rubbing the edge of a glass, but most of our glasses are too massive to vibrate well that way. We tried filling up a few with different amounts of water and striking them, but we could only get a range of about a fourth in those chunky glasses. One delicate glass teacup did allow us to stroke its edge just right to make a note of sorts. But it was nothing like the wine glasses in this Toccata and Fugue in D minor:

After a while, though, hearing Bach on wine glasses is like watching a bear dance: It's not that it's that the bear dances wonderfully that holds your attention, but that it can dance at all. So we looked up an organ version of the Bach and found this lovely video:

The piano-roll-style digital notation here is wonderfully intuitive, whether you read music yet or not. We listened to several pieces more by Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Debussy, and more with similar visuals, enjoying the interplay between sound and sight and the artistry of the varied visual representations we found. P gave us the play-by-play for those pieces included in either version of Fantasia (1940 or 2000), but she also watched with total attention through Bach's entire Cello Suite No. 1, which isn't in either movie:

This exploration also led to watching videos on how a harpsichord works, discussing the differences between harpsichord and piano, and making a mallet from a skewer and rubber bands to try on P's lap harp. She says it sounds a little like a piano.

And if that isn't a nice excursion of ideas from a Mystical Tree, I don't know what is.

Mastermind, Maps, and Mandalas

Since I got back from the Always Learning Live unschooling symposium, I've been trying to get more deliberate about what I put into unschooling, proactively, and not just reacting to what I see in the kids. I was doing that before, but now I'm doing it better. One part of that is being on the lookout for interesting stuff to strew in the kids' paths. A sale notification for Barnes and Noble came across my email some days back, and I ordered some deeply discounted stuff: a puzzle of North America with pictures and labels in English and Spanish, a "Super Why" board game (based on the PBS series of the same name, which is for pre-readers like T and early readers), a coloring book of mandalas meant to be put in a window like stained glass, and the game Mastermind. I first encountered Mastermind in my elementary school library, perhaps a year after it first came out in the seventies. I never had it at home, but I loved it in the library. Its usability design has improved since then:

When the package arrived, I got out the Mastermind game and showed it to P, who was sick with the flu and lounging in an armchair in her room. She didn't want to play at first, so I played a game against myself, talking about it a little so she could see how it went. Her interest piqued, we tried a game with her guessing, which quickly became too frustrating, so we switched to her making the code and me guessing. We played for hours! P quickly understood the system of using mini-pegs to give feedback (so many pegs correct in color and position, so many correct in color but not position), and I thought out loud a lot (I'm not very good at the game without doing so!), so she got a look at my thinking and strategy. At first P claimed she was playing because I wanted to and it would make me happy -- sweet in itself -- but when I said I'd be happy to stop if she wanted to do something else, she owned up to an intense interest of her own, so we kept playing. The next day I got UnschoolerDad to play her a few games, so she got to see a different strategy of guessing and hear a lot of kibitzing between him and me about the advantages of one strategy vs. another. I learned something that day, which is that my usual set of starting guesses has unexpected results if the code I'm trying to guess has more than two pegs of the same color! P has tried guessing a few more times and gotten frustrated quickly. I remember guessing being really hard when I was her age -- there's a lot of abstraction involved in guessing the code quickly. I think she's at a great place for her developmental level in math and logic.

In breaks between games, P and I each colored a page from the Mandalas coloring book, enjoying talking about color combinations, why we chose them, and the effects they created. P also initiated a conversation about methods of getting the desired results from the felt-tip pens we were using. I told her what an art teacher had taught me about that, and P had already figured it out for herself. We also talked about the extreme symmetry of some of the images, and how a computer might be useful for creating such exact symmetry.

With T and P both having had the flu in the last couple of weeks, P is learning about various ways of managing illness -- antipyretics like ibuprofen and acetaminophen for fevers over 102 F or so; expectorants for when coughs become problematic (but not for kids T's age; he has a vaporizer running in his room); the need for lots of fluids and sleep and enough food for energy to fight the infection. The three of us also used a stethoscope to listen to each other's hearts and lungs; I was listening for signs of pneumonia, and the kids were having a good game of doctor's appointment.

Another bit of strewing this week was checking out the book Mistakes That Worked from the library: here's Amazon's cover image for it.

The text is a little dense to hold the kids' interest for long, and the cartoons in the book unfortunately don't correspond to what the book is describing, but some of them are funny. We read about the invention of Coca-Cola, chocolate chip cookies, Post-It notes (I'd heard the story of the adhesive's discovery before, but not how it came to be applied to paper), potato chips, and several other accidental or unintentional discoveries that led to hugely popular products. There's more to browse in the weeks before the book is due.

The North America puzzle led to some cool connections. T and I had fun putting it together, and then we spent some time looking at the pictures on the map. Which areas had cacti? Where were there oil wells? T wanted to know what the oil wells were, so I explained a bit about plants and animals like the dinosaurs turning into oil over millions of years. We looked at the Gulf of Mexico and talked about hurricanes and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, which P remembers because UnschoolerDad and I talked about it a lot at the time, and then again later after I heard a talk from a former physics mentor of mine who was head of the US Geological Survey during the spill. P and T linked this to a tanker oil spill in an episode of Go, Diego, Go! I talked a little about the Exxon Valdez oil spill and the problems it caused for animals and birds. P wished there were real-life oil vacuums that worked as well as the ones in the Diego episode.

Other strewing this week included:

• Bananagrams, which we've had but not played with for a while: T kept cleaning up the tiles and putting them away, but then he had fun spelling some words with me. He's been doing spontaneous bits of cleaning lately; it's nice to see.
• A jigsaw puzzle meant for families to work together, with pieces of three different sizes in different parts of the puzzle: T put together the big pieces and I did the rest.
• A pile of kids' library books that were due back soon: No one even looked at them this time, but T enjoyed it when I offered to read him a book on the history of aircraft. He had lots of good questions, especially about where the people would go in each craft (he picked up quickly on the oddity of an unmanned craft) and how you would pilot it.
• The iPad game Where's My Water?, in which players route water to a crocodile waiting for a bath, negotiating various obstacles and difficulties: both kids are having fun with this, as am I. There are lots of opportunities for looking at fun and/or bizarre cause-and-effect relationships and thinking about some of the physics of fluids.
• Writing thank-you notes for Christmas presents: Okay, not exactly strewing. But P got to think some more about social conventions and what people might like to read in a thank-you note.

Much of the rest of the learning I noticed this week was initiated by the kids. They made some great connections and found interesting things to notice in objects that have been around the house a long time -- a good case for leaving stuff around where it can be seen or found! Here are some of the highlights:

• T went downstairs with me when I went to clean the cat litter boxes one day. He had lots of questions, never having taken a good look at them before. The idea of cat pee causing the litter to clump was fascinating. I've brought some clean litter upstairs in a big bowl to experiment with when it seems like the right moment; we could also try mixing water with other things, like flour, cornstarch, oats, baking soda, salt, sugar...
• I was mending a sweater one evening, sitting next to T while he played with trains on the floor. I said, "Ouch!" and he asked why; I'd poked myself with the needle, I explained. He asked what a needle was, so I showed him -- pointy on one end, with an eye on the other for putting thread through, and here's how you use it. It's easy to forget, sometimes, what little kids haven't yet learned. I'm so glad mine are asking!
• T has been building lots of fancy train-track layouts, sometimes asking for help with them. After watching me mess with some sticky situations where I needed a piece with two male or two female ends to complete a layout, he made one himself where he used a dual-ended female connector to get a bridge in place. He came to me, excited, to tell me about it.
• P and T both asked about how airplanes steer. I showed them the control surfaces on some of their toy planes and talked a little about what each kind could do. We also talked about how both propellers and jet engines work. I'm realizing as I write this that we might do well to follow up with some video. The kids saw both kinds of engines in person at the aircraft museum in my last entry.
• P noticed out loud that if she drools and sucks it back in, or spits in her hand and licks it back up, it's cooler already. Ew, but good stuff -- she thought out loud and accurately about why it got cool quickly (cooler air surrounding), and I talked about the idea of the saliva losing heat to the air by evaporation, which has come up before.
• I was trying to learn the lyrics of the Phineas and Ferb theme song from P, who knows them pretty well. She noticed aloud that there were lots of rhymes, and wondered if all songs and poems rhyme. I mentioned and described haiku as a non-rhyming form. She did something with haiku in kindergarten, and she has the book Zen Ties, which has a character named Ku who always speaks in haiku. (When he is greeted on his arrival in the story, the greeting is of course, "Hi, Ku!") She also said "nanobots" was a weird word and asked what it meant -- robots whose size would be measured in nanometers -- and we compared a nanometer to the smallest thing you could see close up and to the size of a hydrogen atom.
• P noticed again that there seemed to be two Russias on our large world map. She wanted to know why, so I explained that the map had been done as if wrapping a big piece of paper around a globe and overlapping the edges, so both Russia and Alaska could be shown whole. We noticed several other places that appear on both map edges. P asked if Colorado were really a rectangle; this followed on an earlier conversation about how states and countries get their shapes (mostly straight lines from surveys and wiggly lines from rivers) and how some boundaries, including one between Texas and New Mexico, have come into dispute as surveying and GPS technologies have improved. I talked a bit about the difference between a rectangle on a flat piece of paper and the warped, curved rectangle that Colorado really is on the surface of the Earth. P said she wanted to learn lots of things from the map and write them down. More ensued:
• P noticed the equator was well below the center of our map. We noticed there was more land, and more population centers, in the Northern Hemisphere, and that Antarctica was quite truncated, and chalked this up to the map being a political map, and there being no national boundaries and not many people in Antarctica. (We can talk another time about Eurocentrism and other political biases.) We noticed some areas, like the area north of the Arctic Circle and the Sahara desert, where there were very few cities, and those small; and we talked about why not many people would live there.
• Both kids noticed some interesting things about the national flags, many of which appear at the bottom of our map. Liberia's flag is a lot like the U.S. flag. We talked about why: Liberia was founded as a nation by freed U.S. slaves, who took a lot of the details of government, their flag design, and their capital's name from U.S. sources. And they governed even though they were a small minority vs. a large indigenous population -- also arguably a page from U.S. and other colonial history. We noticed the flags of Australia, New Zealand, and Tuvalu were very similar, each having a Union Jack in the upper left and a different pattern of stars in the remainder of the flag. We looked up the patterns and found that Australia's and New Zealand's were each a different version of the Southern Cross, while Tuvalu's was a map of its nine islands, with East on the top and North to the left. I wondered why, but things moved on too quickly to investigate this time.
• P asked me to tell her stories from my childhood. We got through moving when I was two weeks old (with reflections on the recent development of car seats and cat carriers), my first three memories (with links to experiences of tarantulas, spiders, bees, and wasps), and moving to the house where my parents still live and we've visited them, before things moved on to...
• T noticing the "adjustment screw" detail on his non-adjustable plastic wrench from his Erector set and asking what it was for. We got out P's toolkit, including a real adjustable wrench, to show him. They played together with P's set of real tools -- hand-cranked drill, little wooden workbench, screwdriver, etc. -- for a little while before crankiness scuttled that bit of cooperation. Nap and bath time.
• P asked more about Tuvalu while she was in the bath, so I looked things up and we talked more. Their main crop, pulaka, led to talking about what water table means and the drilling of wells. We learned a bit about atolls and how they form. We read about how Tuvalu is threatened by sea-level rise, since its highest point is only 15 feet above sea level. We learned that Tuvalans play a game like cricket, which led to a brief discussion about Britain's influence on its many colonies. P asked if the U.S. had been a British colony, and whether people played cricket here, so we talked about baseball as an offshoot of cricket and the relative unpopularity of cricket in the U.S. compared to baseball. We learned that Tuvalu has few roads, no railroads, 10 square miles of land over 9 islands, one primary school for each island and one boarding secondary school for the entire country of just over 10,000 people, along with an adult literacy rate of 99%, about the same as the U.S. We did the math for how many adults in Tuvalu can''t read, and P noted that she'd never (to her knowledge) met an adult who couldn't read.

This has gotten long enough, so I'll leave my internal insights of this week for another entry: in which UnschoolerMom learns to love housework and refereeing kids' fights? Hmm...

Life is full, learning is good, and this entry is long!

Whoo -- we've had solstice, Christmas, and a trip to an unschooling conference, with nary a blog entry. I'll try to hit the high points rather than fall farther behind!

For three days in late December, P was at a church day camp, which focused on the seven principles of Unitarian-Universalism in the form of the recently-invented holiday Chalica, condensed into three days. P and I celebrated Chalica last year together in a very low-key way at home, but this year we were going to be on the road and otherwise occupied during its Christmas-to-New-Year's span, so camp was it. At chapel each day, there were stories and songs related to that day's principles. Activities, specifically related or not, rounded out the days. A song to the tune of the do-re-mi song in The Sound of Music summarized all the principles (given in brackets) thus:
     One, each person is worthwhile [The inherent worth and dignity of every person]
     Two, be kind in all you do [Justice, equity and compassion in human relations]
     Three, we help each other learn [Acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations]
     Four, and search for what is true [A free and responsible search for truth and meaning]
     Five, all people have a say [The right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large]
     Six, work toward a peaceful world [The goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all]
     Seven, the web of life's the way [Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part]
     That will bring us back to me and UU you!

P had a great time at camp playing with friends, making art, swimming at the local rec center, toasting marshmallows, helping make Stone Soup, and more. On the last day, families were invited to come share the Stone Soup, so T and I went. Both kids really love having a chance to be in the church sanctuary outside church services, exploring the space, asking questions about things, and making the place their own. I remember liking it the same way when I was young, though I started going to church at age 11.

One day while P was at camp, T brought me a Magic School Bus chapter book and asked me to read it to him. We read about half before we got tired of it. T was actively engaged in listening and making sense of the story. He asked questions about the story. At one point he pointed to the last line on a page and asked me what those words said, so I read them to him again. Unsatisfied, he pointed to the quotation marks on the line and asked what those were, finally getting what he was looking for in my explanation. I love watching him crack the code! Around once a day, he asks me how to spell some word, often a long one like transform. He's working actively on his spoken diction as well, starting to differentiate his L and R sounds and pronounce more consonant clusters, all of which makes him much easier to understand. He's also getting good at talking about things in a different way if he can't get us to understand a particular word. Recently he was trying to tell me something about snow, but he kept saying "so," and I just wasn't getting it because there wasn't enough context. He patiently explained, "You know, the white stuff that's falling down from the sky outside." He and I were both very happy when his idea got across!

In the lead-up to Christmas, T and P were doing lots of pretend play. I'm noticing more acceptance of a greater range of play. P used to get irritated at T whenever he wanted to play a female character or have a female name, which happens sometimes -- after all, his biggest pretend-play role model is his sister! I've been noticing recently that she has more slack for this and is embracing his creativity with fewer reservations. To top it off, on the 20th I overheard P saying that she was T's father in the game. Good stuff.

At last Christmas came, with several cool gifts from relatives. Both kids got packages of 10 matchbox-style cars, the better to share playing with cars. P's been asking for some of her own, since T has so many! There were Polly Pockets and a camper van for them, Barbies and clothes for them, Transformers, and an erector set, which have made for great separate and shared play. We also gave T an airplane that comes apart, using a battery-operated, kid-size cordless screwdriver. He spent hours over the next couple of days (before we left town and had to leave it behind) very earnestly taking the plane apart (always with some reason it needed to be fixed), reassembling it, and flying it about. He's a natural with the tool, even better than I expected. (P has had a small set of real tools and some wood to use them with for years, and she enjoys them too.) The grandparents also picked some things from my wish list for the family, giving us a set of Cuisenaire rods and a United States map that goes with our Tag reader. The map is getting some play, and the Cuisenaire rods have already led into some informal exploration of addition, multiplication, area, volume, square and cubic numbers, and prime numbers. I'm having fun with my Christmas gift, too -- a coffee-table book of the elements with amazing illustrations and amusing and informative text. It's getting read aloud a lot, mostly by me to UnschoolerDad, but the kids get to hear and see some of the good parts, too. Christmas stockings also provided pocket magnifiers that came along on our trip and got some use looking at color elements on TV screens and playing with light refracting in through motel peepholes.

And then we went on our trip! We attended a symposium in Albuquerque for unschooling parents and families tied to the Always Learning list, one of Sandra Dodd's many gifts to the world. Sandra spoke, and so did Pam Sorooshian, Joyce Fetteroll, and several other long-time unschooling parents who contribute to the list, as well as some always-unschooled children, teens, and young adults. There were play rooms set up for kids right next to the room for speakers, so parents could go back and forth as needed. I missed parts of talks while mediating kid difficulties, but it was good to be able to hear what I did, and UnschoolerDad filled me in on some of what I missed. He also took turns helping the kids.

There weren't a huge number of new ideas for me at the symposium (though there were some), since I've been reading the list faithfully for a year now. I did find the experience valuable, though, in that I got to see other unschooling families in action and hear about some ideas in new ways that allowed for deeper understanding. One idea that sounded preposterous to me before the symposium, but that I'm thinking about more seriously now, is that children can be treated as guests in their homes. They didn't ask to join our families; we parents decided to have them, and we committed to their upbringing and care. As such, it may make more sense to keep doing chores and such ourselves, accepting help as it's willingly given rather than requiring it. I do find that P helps more willingly (whether asked or not) when I request help less, and not trying to require chores certainly reduces the adversarial situations between us and creates more opportunities for grace. One young-adult speaker, always unschooled, talked about how her mom always had a hard time getting help with chores other than laundry. The key difference, it seems, was that the mom enjoyed doing laundry. When the mom realized this and started being more cheerful about other tasks, help became more available with those as well. Another speaker, a mom, talked about giving up on getting taking-out-trash help from her husband (who was forced to do that chore as a child and never wanted to do it again), and instead asking kids along to do it with her and making it fun. There was an in-ground trampoline on the way from their back door to the trash cans, and taking out the trash turned into a short, fun family expedition, chatty, playful, and stress-free, with children enthusiastically finding their shoes to come along. One of the ideas Sandra Dodd talks about a lot is releasing our sense that we "have to" do anything in particular, and instead emphasizing that we choose our actions, in general (by choosing the principles by which we wish to live) and from moment to moment. We don't actually have to mop the floor. We can choose to, or we can let many socks do the job, or we can play Cinderella from time to time, or we can just let it be dirty, or... you get the idea. That idea is an important one for me, when I'm considering that perhaps chores are my job, not something to be forced upon youthful conscripts. I can choose my priorities. And one of them can be supporting my kids' priorities, so they can learn to make good choices and establish their own priorities and principles, rather than living life as a list of have-tos based on other people's priorities.

The array of things for kids to play with during the symposium was wonderful. There were art supplies, coloring books (including beautiful stained-glass mandalas), puzzles, mazes, Geoboards, Doodle Tops (with crayon tips), dinosaurs, pipe cleaners, a foam Fraction Burger, and lots more. The bigger kids' room had lots of board and card games, and several kids played Minecraft in there on various laptops that came with them. P joined them for a time on my computer, but unfortunately it had some problems. She did benefit from the expertise of some of the other kids, though, watching and learning from their amazing creations. Both kids had a great time with the Geoboards, and adults happening by and looking at the patterns they created often made comments that got the kids thinking even more. I think there are some Geoboards in our near future. Both kids also got to play with other kids a lot, both near their ages and not. We got some contact information for staying in touch with new friends. Unfortunately, none of them are local. But P is very enthusiastic about going to future unschooling conferences, so we may see some of them then if we don't see them sooner on trips!

P was very fearful and clingy when we went to the first evening gathering at the symposium. She was absolutely not willing to do the getting-to-know-you games that were going on, so I took her to the kids' play area to check out the toys. She played there happily for a long time, and by the time other people started coming in, she was ready to be social and get into the groove. Other big feelings came up a couple of times when she was dealing with younger children who were hitting. I sat with her outside and helped her release the feelings, and she rejoined the play with greater flexibility, enthusiasm, and resourcefulness. (This -- encouraging the release of big, hard feelings rather than changing the environment to make things easier -- is not an approach I learned from unschoolers, but it's one I think we'll keep using for a while, yet, because the rewards are great.) T wandered about from play room to snack table to our laps, getting his food and parent fixes as needed, and was on a pretty even keel emotionally the whole time. Both kids adapted easily to where and when noisy play was okay or not okay, and they enjoyed living all in one room in hotels. T, as usual, was sorry for the trip to end, though when he saw the left-behind toys, he didn't stay sad for long!

On the way home, we had some fun. We played tourist in Albuquerque, peeking in a few shops and eating our New-Mexican-leftovers lunch in the plaza in Old Town. We read about the brief occupation of Albuquerque by the Confederacy in 1862, and how the confederate troops buried eight cannons near the plaza and church as they fled. The former Confederate leader returned years later and showed the locals where to find the cannons, which by then were underneath a chile patch. Two of them (replicas now, because the originals were so valuable) are still on display in the plaza. We brought home a ristra of New Mexico red chile peppers (hard to find around here) and a blanket to remember Albuquerque by.

On a brief stop in Santa Fe, we browsed the markets, enjoyed some red-chile kettle corn, and found another couple of souvenirs. At first, as we waited to use a hotel restroom, I was distressed at how coiffed, made-up, and put-together the folks in Santa Fe seemed to be, compared to those in Albuquerque or other places I've been comfortable with my casual self. But it turned out that was the selection effect of the pricey hotel and the expensive shops on its ground level; once we hit the plaza, it was just folks again. The amount of public art on display in Santa Fe was impressive; I'm glad such creativity doesn't have to go along with people who go to such lengths to change their appearances.

Our last tourist stop before home was an aircraft museum in Pueblo, Colorado. There were dozens of aircraft on display, ranging in history from the Civil War to nearly the present, and a couple of helicopters were open to explore the inside and check out the instrumentation and seating, which made the kids happy. We also saw bombs, a space shuttle tire used on Atlantis, a MASH-type evacuation helicopter for the wounded, and many other craft. A huge captured Nazi flag was on display, and we talked about how Germany had changed from being our enemy in WWII to being an ally now, and what ally means. We saw a display of uniforms from real, local, female servicemembers. One Pueblo woman whose uniform was displayed had been a test pilot for prototype aircraft during WWII. We talked about the danger such a job would involve, and the high level of skill a good test pilot would need. P and T each chose a model airplane to bring home; T indulged his perpetual love of biplanes, and P chose a Blue Angels F/A-18 Hornet, which she's been cuddling as blissfully as any doll. Today we found a web site about the Hornet, because we wanted to know how fast it could go. P's eyes were wide as we compared its Mach 1.7+ top speed to a fast ordinary car and to the fastest racing cars. P remembered seeing something like the Blue Angels in the movie Cars, and seeing the real Blue Angels fly over our house from time to time in Boulder. We also bought a water rocket that should be fun to play with, exploring the effects of pressure and Newton's third law, when we get a warm day.

Since we returned, I've been trying to leave something fun or interesting on the coffee table each night for the kids to find in the morning -- a form of strewing that Sandra recently referred to as a "daily special." I love that idea, though I can imagine I'll have to give it some thought to come up with things. This morning I left out a set of blocks, similar to the Jenga game, to play with, having found them in a closet last night. The kids were up before me, and by the time I came out, there was a problem with not enough blocks to go around, so I got out some alphabet blocks and Connectagons. P went to town with the Connectagons, building a Robot Town and regaling us with stories about the various robots and how they worked. Later she was pretending to be a robot. This evening I put out the Tag reader, the books currently loaded on it, and the U.S. Tag map. T asked P to play with a Tag book geared to helping kids learn to write letters, which she willingly did as he watched, absorbed. The Tag things were meant to be tomorrow's daily special. I guess it's a good thing for me, for my own development as a co-discoverer with my kids of interesting stuff, that I can't wait to get out the fun stuff once I think of it. Maybe I'll get out a jigsaw puzzle for tomorrow, one that no one's seen for a while. I could really get to like this!

Our Own Slow Solstice

As we approach the solstice, the tipping of the Earth relative to the Sun slows, and the first derivative of the length-of-day graph approaches zero. Any math geek has got to love the solstice! Our activities have remained low-key and home-centered as we get over more people's colds. We are all finally well now (knock wood!), so things are starting to pick up again. We've decided to go to an unschooling symposium nearby just after Christmas. I'm looking forward to some in-person time with the unschooling parents who do so much good mentoring on the Always Learning list.

I read an interesting article this week, making the case from experimental evidence that delaying the teaching of arithmetic in schools results in much more rapid learning when it is finally introduced (in the experiment, the experimental group started arithmetic lessons in sixth grade), but also confers an intriguing benefit -- when arithmetic instruction in K-5 is replaced with practice telling stories and otherwise communicating out loud to others (not, I should note, specifically about numbers!), those students are far ahead of control-group kids at the beginning of sixth grade in their ability to solve arithmetic story problems, even though they've had no formal arithmetic instruction. The experimental group didn't do as well on traditionally-formatted arithmetic problems as the control group at the beginning of sixth grade, but by the end of sixth grade, they'd caught up. I love this article. Having taught math to middle- and high-schoolers, I know that story problems give many students nightmares. But in the end, story problems -- using math to think about real-world situations-- are exactly what math is FOR. And even though P and I have done very little arithmetic practice together, when she talks about numbers, I see that she has good number sense, and that she's using numbers in very sensible and sometimes creative ways. I am encouraged. And I should listen more intently when P tells me stories, as she does at pretty much every opportunity!

P sang her holiday choir concerts this past week. She and I rode the bus to her Saturday evening concert and back. It took more time overall, but it meant we had a good half hour on each end of the concert during which our attention was undivided. As P put it, "I like taking the bus with you, because we can talk the whole way, and you never have to focus on driving, only getting us off at the right stop." Our schedule in the new year will give more one-on-one time for both kids with me and UnschoolerDad. I'm looking forward to it, and so is P, who is already planning out how she wants to spend some of those "date nights."

This week, P, T, and I mixed up salt dough, rolled it out, cut it into Christmasy shapes, baked them, and painted them to be ornaments for our tree. This was our first time trying acrylic paints, which takes more work from me to prevent gummed-up brushes than when we use watercolors, but the bright colors are very satisfying. And the time on task fit in with something I've been working on, which is being more present for the kids, and more available to stop what I'm doing and play or explore with them when they ask or a good opportunity arises. It's a thousand little decisions, not one big one, but each time I decide in favor of doing something with them, it gets easier. The house isn't as clean as it has sometimes been, but I think we can cope. Sandra Dodd posted a piece of a poem on the AlwaysLearning list that's helpful here:

    The cleaning and scrubbing can wait till tomorrow
    But children grow up as I've learned to my sorrow
    So quiet down cobwebs; Dust go to sleep!
    I'm rocking my baby and babies don't keep.
         - Ruth Hulbert Hamilton

On the housework side of that balance, the other day, when we were all immersed in our own things, T got up and announced he was going to clean up the living room. He put several toys away and then settled back down again. I thanked him. If I'd gotten up and joined him, he might have done more, but I was too tired at that moment. Here's hoping for more opportunities to combine togetherness and cleaning up!

As we've tried to shake this long cold , there have been several pretty sedentary days with lots of media. P has now watched the entire three-season run of Phineas and Ferb on Netflix. As she watched the last few episodes, I joined her while knitting, and I found the show to be rich in cultural references and awesome vocabulary, much of which is probably going over P's head at this point. I shared those observations with P and invited her to ask me about anything she wants as she's watching. For just one example, the mother remarked to Candace once that she'd gone into the backyard to look at the monkeys Candace told her were there, but instead found "a stunning lack of monkeys." We spent a minute taking that apart, since stunning and lack were both new words for P. P's asked several vocabulary questions since then, either while watching or at other times, seemingly out of the blue. She's invited me to watch episodes with her that she thought I would enjoy (and I did!). She also makes some interesting observations about the show. She noticed the Frankenstein monster in the title sequence, linked it to our earlier discussion about the Frankenstein story, and gleefully reported her find. She also observed out loud that little Suzy (who appears totally sweet to most people but makes a few lives pretty hellish) was an even bigger bully than Buford, as we watched an episode in which Suzy bullied Candace, and in which Buford admitted to Suzy being what he was most afraid of in the world.

P has been doing less pleasure reading recently; this is a little surprising to me, given how voracious she was for a while. She still reads all kinds of incidental things throughout the day and shows a good level of understanding of them. And a couple of times, when I've suggested that getting ready early for bed would give her more time to read in bed, she's jumped at the chance. So I'm taking it easy about the change for now: if I push reading when she's not particularly interested in it, it seems sure to make her even less interested. I'm also noticing that her spelling and handwriting are still improving. Perhaps when Phineas and Ferb gets old, the next cool chapter book will seem a little shinier. P also volunteered that she sometimes reads an article in a magazine I've left out in the bathroom -- I think it's time for some good strewing in that room.

P and I did watch a DVD together this week with stories from several great children's books, some of which P's first-grade class read before she left school, and some of which were new to us. The stories were The Man Who Walked Between Buildings (about the tightrope-walker who illicitly strung a cable between the nearly-complete towers of the World Trade Center and then walked it for hours before he submitted to arrest; his punishment was to perform for the city's children, which he loved doing), Miss Rumphius (about making the world more beautiful, with some side-trips for us into how flowers propagate and how seeds spread naturally), Snowflake Bentley (about the man who spent his life capturing photos of snowflakes; we spotted some wonderful ones in the latest snowfall here and enjoyed sharing them with each other in the same spirit, though we need some magnifying glasses!), and The Pot That Juan Built (which goes into many of the processes for making traditional clay pottery in the Southwest and points south). All were based on true stories and processes, some of which we followed up to find out more afterward. We also watched a The Way Things Work DVD on Floating, which covered both buoyancy and the basics of sailing.

A few days later, I was trying to think of something new to add to our day, and I remembered a bag of corn husks, older than my marriage, that I'd evicted from the kitchen while cleaning up a bit. P said she'd be up for making corn-husk dolls with me (she'd expressed an interest in this before), so I looked up a tutorial to get us started, and we were off and running.

We made these (brother and sister, resting together on a big corn-husk pillow) in about 20 minutes, not counting some soaking time for the corn husks. We reinforced our knot lore. And when P had her two dolls and was ready to move on to something else, I used the rest of our soaked corn husks to make a large corn-husk angel to top our Christmas tree, since our previous tree topper broke last year.

We went to two open gyms in different locations this week, one with both kids and one with just P (T was too young for that one, so he got some one-on-one time with UnschoolerDad). I've started to work more during such events at spotting other kids that my kids are enjoying, finding their parents, and extending myself more to make contact with them and check out the possibilities for play dates -- especially for T, who has no ready-made cadre of former school friends and is getting more interested in playing with other kids. I used to resist this kind of connection because my introverted side feared rejection or other sources of social awkwardness. As I learn and live through more things, however, I am developing more courage to act in spite of embarrassment and emotional vulnerability; and I realized it was time to stop letting my own fears be the limiting factor in my kids' social lives. There's no surfeit of play dates to show for these efforts yet, but I'll keep trying, realizing that not every attempt will pan out, and that making new commitments around the holidays is not high on most families' lists of things to do! In the meantime, the kids and I are enjoying each other's company more and more, and that is all to the good.

Cabin Fever and Its Fruits

Another week and though I'm improving slowly, I'm still sick. I guess I need more sleep. But unschooling carries on, albeit at a somewhat slower pace and with a measure of cabin fever.

In the world of ideas about school: Two different people pointed me to a Washington Post article about a school board member, a very successful businessman, who pledged to take the high-stakes tests students in his district were required to pass for graduation, and to publish his results. Of 60 math questions (to take just one section), he knew the answers to none but was able to guess correctly at 10. This experience raised huge questions for him about who writes these tests, who decides what should be on them, and how the results should be used -- he would have been required to take a remedial reading course based on his results. I recommend the article heartily.

Here's a simple, mama-needs-sleep-soon list of highlights for us this week:

• We set up and decorated our large artificial Christmas tree. P is now strong and dexterous enough to get the branches into place on the trunk, and T can now read letters reliably, so my role has been reduced to fluffing up the branches, mediating minor squabbles, and doing things too high for either child to reach. It was a good exercise in cooperation among the three of us, and we did pretty well. Our biggest wrangle was over playing with ornaments (delicate) as if they were toys (stronger). After gluing several broken ornaments back together, I ended up hanging the precious things high and giving up on protecting things that weren't of great sentimental value to any of us. The subsequent decrease in interest in the ornaments has me wondering whether my reaction wasn't one of the fun parts of playing with them. In any case, one of the things I'm working on is decreasing my attachment to particular objects and ways of doing things, especially where that attachment conflicts with my kids' desires for learning and interesting experiences.
• We rolled, cut, and baked dough ornaments. Decorating them is waiting on a trip to the craft store for acrylic paints. As we measured the flour for the dough, we found it infested with some kind of maggots. We looked them up and found they were probably Indian Meal Moths, common worldwide. We looked at photos of them, read a bit about their life cycle and methods for controlling them, and then proceeded to sift them out of the flour and make our ornaments. At least one was alive and wiggling. Having lived in Northern California, where similar (identical?) critters called orchard moths are everywhere, we already keep most of our vulnerable foodstuffs in airtight containers, but our crafts-only white flour was unprotected.
• We roasted some chestnuts, after looking up different ways to cook them and settling on the method used by New York street vendors, which is to boil them until tender and then just toast them a bit for nice looks. Along the way we looked at photos of chestnut trees, chestnut lumber, and the furry green casings in which the nuts grow. We talked a bit about chestnut blight and how its has almost completely wiped out American chestnut trees, so we're eating chestnuts from Asian chestnut trees, which coevolved with the blight. After speculating a bit about the etymology of chestnut, we looked it up and found it has nothing to do with chests, but is most likely what some English speaker heard when someone said Castanea, the genus name and original name of the tree in many places, across language groups.
• P got out an origami-per-day calendar I gave her a while back and wanted to learn to fold things from it. I'm helping her learn to read the instructions and diagrams and do the various techniques. She gets very frustrated sometimes. This week she was fuming loudly in the spectators' area during T's gymnastics lesson, and I said if she couldn't handle her frustration without bothering the people around us, she should wait until we got home to work on the origami. I was pleased to see that she was able to to quiet down and still work through her frustration to a satisfactory result. Learning something you're interested in is always satisfying generally, but not always fun in the moment!
• I'd been noticing that lots of P's pretend play was about being poor, so on one car ride, I suggested we brainstorm the minimum possessions a family living in very limited conditions (no running water or electricity) would need. P took me up on it. She played along as we thought about things like one cooking pot and a fire ring or some kind of stove to use it on; but she really lit up when we started thinking about toys and books. She thought they'd have a few, but when I told her that many poor families have no toys or books at all, she thought long and hard about what kinds of things the kids would play with, or how they might learn to read if they had the opportunity. We got another angle on poverty on a more typical United-States level when I told her a story I'd just read about a family, living on a very tight budget, who had decided to give each other only one gift each, with a $5 spending limit -- and how that Christmas was the best they'd ever had. We have been burning through savings this year and doing less discretionary spending than usual because we're waiting to see the first income from an independent software project to be released very soon, and I can see from her play that money is very much on P's mind. I'm trying to strike a balance in talking with her about money and poverty, not romanticizing poverty, but also letting P know that not having lots of money doesn't mean a family can't have a good life. The kids and I had planned to sign up to help sort gifts at the Share-a-Gift "store," where families who can't afford Christmas presents can pick out donated toys and books to give their kids; but while I was ill and delaying new commitments, volunteer registration filled up. We'll still sort through what we have to donate some gently-used toys to the program.
• After last week's bullying in gymnastics, P and I talked about what might happen if we spoke to the hair-pulling girls and their parents (with possibilities ranging from the situation being resolved to the girls really having it in for her). Today in class, P made a connection with one of the girls and got her to stop; the other girl wasn't in class. Here's hoping this episode of P's education in dealing with bullies is over.
• After reading a thread about art on my favorite unschooling email list (AlwaysLearning), I decided to increase the kids' independent access to art supplies. We took our arts/crafts basket down from the counter and put it on the train table, which never gets used for trains anyway since the floor is so much nicer for big track layouts. P and I sorted supplies and found containers to make them easy to find and use, and I put just a few things up high so T can't decorate too many walls in an unsupervised moment. There's more ongoing art happening now. P has been writing in pretend Chinese characters -- she loves the concept of ideograms for words. I dug up a postcard from my adventures on PostCrossing.com on which my correspondent had illustrated the steps for writing "hi" (Ni Hao) in Chinese, and put them into a form P can use more readily when she's ready for some real characters. Besides art supplies, we started a container of bits and bobs that could be incorporated into creations. P enjoyed taking apart and reassembling some older, less-efficient sink aerators we recently replaced, asking about what they were for, and then transforming them into buildings in a town, with scrap-yarn roads and an inexplicably tall dentist's office building. P's appetite for making creations has been whetted; now she wants lots of yarn she can use to make giant spiderwebs. It's on the shopping list!

The kids have spent a lot of time on Netflix and at other iPad pastimes while I've been sick. I get glimpses:

• P writing "I Love You" with alphabet-soup letters in the Morris Lessmore app
• Both kids transforming Morris Lessmore characters into characters from famous books and related movies. One was the Bride of Frankenstein, which reminded us of a friend's photo I'd recently shown P on Facebook, of her post-op "Frankenfoot," all gussied up with neck bolts and such to go with the stitches, and accompanied by "Bride of Frankenfoot," her other foot, with the classic tall, gray-templed hairdo -- everything really does relate to everything else somewhere! P was curious, so I told her the basics of the story of the creation of Frankenstein's monster.
• P asking today, out of the blue, what a shrine is. She's been watching Phineas and Ferb, a Disney cartoon series she discovered on her own, and one character built a shrine for another who'd been sucked into another dimension. P described the shrine to me in great detail. I told her a little about shrines on different scales, from a tabletop to a building, and we talked a little about what they're for (reminders of loved ones or religious figures; places to focus, pray, and/or meditate). Thank goodness there's something to be learned from P&F, and P's willing to ask the key questions.

P and I also watched a bit more of Cosmos together. One episode, "Heaven and Hell," covered some ground we've seen before, about asteroid impacts, the Tunguska event, etc., as well as vividly describing the hot, corrosive atmosphere of Venus. I stopped to clarify things, including why the planets' appearances and their distances from each other couldn't easily be shown in the same scale, and how the solar-system model used in the series obscures the fact that an asteroid or comet, zooming through our solar system, has a negligible chance of hitting any planet. The word negligible made for an interesting discussion -- I explained it as "so small you could basically ignore it," which led back to more talk about scale -- how small is that? So small relative to what? We also wrestled a bit with helping P understand Kepler's Second Law of Planetary Motion (planets in orbit sweep out equal areas in equal times) -- we'll have to find some better ways of exploring the concept of area, but I think P got the basic idea.

The other big vocabulary-builder recently has been Dragonsinger, which UnschoolerDad finished reading to P tonight. P asks about unfamiliar words, and when UD isn't sure, he calls me in for my knowledge and my willingness to look words up. Just tonight I gave them definitions of querulous and sinecure, as well as a couple more I've already forgotten. Bless Anne McCaffrey; from beyond the grave she's enriching my daughter's vocabulary along with her imagination.